You carry a 1.3 kg mass of fatty material in your head that controls everything you will ever do. This fantastic control center lets you think, learn, create, and feel emotions. It also controls everything your body does. What is this amazing machine? It's your brain — a structure so amazing that the famous scientist James Watson called it ＂the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe＂.

    Imagine your kitten jumped onto the kitchen counter, and was about to step onto a hot stove. You would have only seconds to act. In situations like this, your brain reads the signals from your eyes and quickly calculates when, where and at what speed you need to run to save her. Then it tells your muscles to move. No computer can match your brain's great ability to download, process, and react to the flood of information from your eyes, ears and other sensory organs.

    If a bee lands on your foot, sensory neurons(神经元) in your skin send this information to your brain at a speed of more than 240 kilometers per hour. Your brain then uses motor neurons to send a message back to your foot: Shake the bee off quickly! Motor neurons can send this information at more than 320 kilometers per hour!

    Your brain contains about 100 billion tiny cells: neurons — it would take you more than 3,000 years if you tried to count them all. Whenever you dream, laugh, think, see or move, tiny chemical and electrical signals are racing between these neurons along billions of tiny neuron pathways. Believe it or not, the activity in your brain never stops. Countless messages fly around inside it every second, like a super-fast game of table tennis. Your neurons create and send more messages than all the phones in the entire world. And although a single neuron generates only a tiny amount of electricity, all your neurons together can generate enough electricity to power a light bulb.

    Christopher Thomas, 27, was a writer by night and a teacher by day when he noticed he was always tired and was losing weight fast. Diagnosed with diabetes (糖尿病), Thomas would need to inject himself with insulin (胰岛素) three times a day for the rest of his life or risk nerve damage, blindness, and even death. And if that weren't bad enough, he had no health insurance.

    After a month of feeling upset, Thomas decided he'd better find a way to fight back. He left Canton, Michigan for New York, got a job waiting tables, nicknamed himself the Diabetic Rockstar, and created diabeticrockstar.com, a free online community for diabetics and their loved ones—a place where over 1,100 people share personal stories, information, and resources.

    Jason Swencki's son, Kody, was diagnosed with type diabetes at six. Father and son visit the online children's forums (论坛) together most evenings. “Kody gets so excited, writing to kids from all over,” says Swencki, one of the site's volunteers. “They know what he's going through, so he doesn't feel alone.”

    Kody is anything but alone: Diabetes is now the seventh leading cause of death in the United States, with 24 million diagnosed cases. And more people are being diagnosed at younger ages.

    These days, Thomas's main focus is his charity (慈善机构), Fight It, which provides medicines and supplies to people—225 to date—who can't afford a diabetic's huge expen­ses. Fight－it.org has raised about $23,000—in products and in cash. In May, Thomas will hold the first annual Diabetic Rockstar Festival in the Caribbean.

    Even with a staff of 22 volunteers, Thomas often devotes up to 50 hours a week to his cause, while still doing his full­time job waiting tables. “Of the diabetes charities out there, most are putting money into finding a cure，” says Bentley Gubar, one of Rockstar's original members. “But Christopher is the only person I know saying people need help now.”

    Alex Elman runs a big business—something hard to imagine after she lost her sight in her twenties. But Elman says that losing her sight helped her focus on finding success.

    Elman's father planted a hillside vineyard(葡萄园)in western Massachusetts in 1981. It's where Elman spent the darkest period of her life. When she was 27 years old, she went blind as a result of diabetes(糖尿病) 17 years ago. She recalled，“I hid in my home. I hid in the place，to me, that was the safest place in the world.”

    However, she found a new way forward.

    Elman is the founder of Alex Elman Wines, a growing competitor of organic wines from all around the world: Chianti from Italy, Torrontes from Argentina.

    Elman's isn't solitary in her work. Instead, she has a good assistant, a guide dog named Hanley. Hanley is something of a professional wine taster and travels to all of the wine factories that Elman runs, from South America to Europe.

    At first, Elman wouldn't accept a guide dog. Now it's hard to imagine her life, or her business, without him. She said, "When someone tells me something is organic and I don't really believe it because I taste something funny on it, m put it in front of his face and if he likes the wine, he'll actually go in and sniff it. If if s not right, he'll turn his head away. That's how we know whether the soil is actually organic.”

    Elman believes the loss of her sight was a gift from God. She said, “It allowed me to pay attention to what I thought was important. Therefore, adapt to a situation, and you'll be all right. Because you can't change it anyway, right?”

D

Preparing Cities for Robot Cars

    The possibility of self-driving robot cars has often seemed like a futurist's dream, years away from materializing in the real world. Well, the future is apparently now. The California Department of Motor Vehicles began giving permits in April for companies to test truly self-driving cars on public roads. The state also cleared the way for companies to sell or rent out self-driving cars, and for companies to operate driverless taxi services. California, it should be noted, isn't leading the way here. Companies have been testing their vehicles in cities across the country. It's hard to predict when driverless cars will be everywhere on our roads. But however long it takes, the technology has the potential to change our transportation systems and our cities, for better or for worse, depending on how the transformation is regulated.

    While much of the debate so far has been focused on the safety of driverless cars(and rightfully so), policymakers also should be talking about how self-driving vehicles can help reduce traffic jams, cut emissions(排放) and offer more convenient, affordable mobility options. The arrival of driverless vehicles is a chance to make sure that those vehicles are environmentally friendly and more shared.

    Do we want to copy — or even worsen — the traffic of today with driverless cars? Imagine a future where most adults own individual self-driving vehicles. They tolerate long, slow journeys to and from work on packed highways because they can work, entertain themselves or sleep on the ride, which encourages urban spread. They take their driverless car to an appointment and set the empty vehicle to circle the building to avoid paying for parking. Instead of walking a few blocks to pick up a child or the dry cleaning, they send the self-driving minibus. The convenience even leads fewer people to take public transport — an unwelcome side effect researchers have already found in ride-hailing(叫车) services.

    A study from the University of California at Davis suggested that replacing petrol-powered private cars worldwide with electric, self-driving and shared systems could reduce carbon emissions from transportation 80% and cut the cost of transportation infrastructure(基础设施) and operations 40% by 2050. Fewer emissions and cheaper travel sound pretty appealing. The first commercially available driverless cars will almost certainly be fielded by ride-hailing services, considering the cost of self-driving technology as well as liability and maintenance issues(责任与维护问题). But driverless car ownership could increase as the prices drop and more people become comfortable with the technology.

    Policymakers should start thinking now about how to make sure the appearance of driverless vehicles doesn't extend the worst aspects of the car-controlled transportation system we have today. The coming technological advancement presents a chance for cities and states to develop transportation systems designed to move more people, and more affordably. The car of the future is coming. We just have to plan for it.

    He is a lesson to every boy who ever picked up a basketball and dreamed that it would change his life.

    The lights were never brighter and the crowds were never bigger for a homegrown sports hero than they were a quarter-century ago for Ray Hall. But his athletic achievements, as impressive as they are, are to my mind not what is most admirable about the man.

    Known as “Sugar Ray” in his teens, Hall was rated among the country's top 25 high school basketball players. An inner-city kid from a solid family, Hall took on the challenge of lifting Canisius College — still recovering from its failure — back to respectability, rejecting more favorable offers. His status of a savior (救世主) brought more pressure than any 18-year-old should have to handle. However, I watched him mature into the player who led Canisius back to daylight.

    After college Hall played professionally in Italy and Greece for over 10 years until a car accident at 32 ended his basketball career. The news that he would never play again shocked Hall but unlike so many others he was ready for life after basketball. When I met Hall — still fit at 46 — for lunch Monday, he wore a cut-sharp gray suit, designer tie and blazing white shirt that screamed Success. “That was always the question — when the cheers end, where do you go? Who do you turn to?” he said. “It starts and ends with that person in the mirror.”

    Hall got the concept of academics-first from his parents. He graduated from Canisius a semester early. “No matter how good of an athlete you are, you are just one injury away from losing it all,” he said. “But if you take care of things academically, you are prepared until you leave this earth.”

    For the past 14 years, he has been in a computer sales job at Ingram Micro. He married his college sweetheart. They have three kids and a nice house in the suburbs. He figured out early what others learn too late: Athletics is part of a journey, not the destination.

    Congratulations, Ray, you made it. In more ways than one.

    I did some research and examined how British English and American English changed between the 1930s and the 2000s. Take spelling, for example towards the 1960s it looked like the UK was going in the direction of not using the "u" in "colour" and writing "centre" as "center". But since then, the British have become more confident in some of their own spellings. In the 2000s, the UK used an American spelling choice about 11% of the time while Americans use a British one about 10% of the time. There is also no need to worry too much about American words, such as "vacation", "liquor" and "lawmaker" entering British English. There are a few examples of this kind of vocabulary change but they are mostly uncommon words and are not likely to change British English too much. The British are still using "mum" rather than "mom" and "petrol" rather than "gas".

    But when we start thinking of language more in terms of style than vocabulary or spelling, a different picture appears. Some of the bigger trends (趋势) in American English are moving towards a freer use of language. American sentences are usually one word shorter in 2006 than they were in 1931.

    Americans also use a lot more apostrophes (撇号) in their writing than they used to, which has the effect of turning the two words "do not" into the single "don't". "The hand of the king" becomes the shorter "The king's hand".

    However, in all these ways Brits are changing too—and in the same way as Americans. They're just about 30 years behind the trend that Americans seem to be leading.

    So this raises a question, is British English actively following American English or is this something that is simply a natural trend in language use? Perhaps the British would have gone in that direction even if America had been discovered? I'd like to agree with the second idea but because of the fact that British people learn plenty of American language through different ways, I think the first is more correct.